TOPIC: Steinbeck, Politics, and the American Dream Panel Session at the American Literature Association 2012: May 24-27 The American Literature Association's 23rd annual conference will take place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco in Embarcadero Center on the dates of May 24- 27, 2012 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend). Submit proposals to Paul Douglass of the Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University:Paul.Douglass@sjsu.edu

The 12th annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies invites graduate students to submit proposals that engage broadly with notions of knowledge--its transmission, translation and commodifcation in economies of power. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions ranging in historical focus from the 11th to the 17th century. Our topic is intended to be expansive rather than limiting, inviting notions of knowledge that work across the boundaries of scholastic and vernacular culture and embrace both elite and popular practices and forms of understanding.

ESSE 2012 will be organised by Bogazici University, in Istanbul on 4-9 September 2012. Biannual ESSE conferences are the most significant events of ESSE, European Society for the Study of English, which was created in Rome in January 1990 as a European federation of national higher educational associations for the study of English. The Society endeavors to reflect the cultural and geographical diversity of Europe in its institutions and represents more than 7500 members from 33 countries.

Maternal Patriotism: Motherhood and Citizenship in 19th-Century American Women's Writing

This is a call for a proposed panel for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Triennial Conference.

In Women of the Republic, Linda Kerber documents the origins of an American ideology of womanhood and citizenship and describes the rise of what she aptly calls republican motherhood. Kerber argues that in the days after the American Revolution "a consensus developed around the idea that a mother committed to the service of her family and to the state, might serve a political purpose."

In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Žižek describes Lacan's readings of classical, literary, and philosophical texts as "a case of violent appropriation…displacing the work from its proper hermeneutic context." And yet, he argues, "this very violent gesture brings about a breathtaking 'effect of truth'" and "a shattering new insight."